Jonathan Chait’s article, “Fact Finders,” in the new TNR is one of the most obnoxiously blinkered pieces of self-serving political magazine writing in recent memory. I’m just flabbergasted by the stupidity of this thing. Chait’s claim is that liberals by and large are empiricists, willing to go where the evidence takes them, while conservatives (loosely and irresponsibly identified with free-market types) are dogmatists who will unaccountably but doggedly cling to principle even after being brought low by data. The claim is almost self-refuting. It should be impossible for an intelligent and observant person, such as Chait imagines himself to be, to fail to see the ravages of dogmatic narrowness on all sides. To claim the mantle of empiricism exclusively for liberalism (or any -ism) in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that that empiricism is water in ideology’s oil is a signal failure of empiricism.
An empiricist about the alignments of empiricists will surely comes to this (my) conclusion:
There are surpassingly few empiricists about politics. And among those wide-minded few there are liberals, conservatives, libertarians, etc. The reason we do not converge on an evidence-based consensus is that we all started with different priors, and all use different methods of updating our beliefs, about which we also have different priors, which causes us to avail ourselves of certain kinds of evidence and not others, to trust certain kinds of studies and not others, to give credence to certain experts and not others, to mistrust certain methods of inquiry, and not others.
Surely Chait has heard of confirmation bias. John Hollander once wrote a book of poems about writing poems. A villanelle about writing villanelles, a sonnet about sonnets. “Fact Finders” reminded me of that sort of thing, but as satire. Assignment: Write an article about how YOUR ideology embodies true blue commitment to just-the-facts empiricism while in fact demonstrating the kind of confirmation bias that makes just-the-facts empiricism all but chimerical in political discourse. Jonathan Chait: A+!
“Fact Finders” also exemplifies a strange lack of coherence about the nature of liberalism, no doubt a symptom of Chait’s admiring belief that liberalism is marked by it’s lack of coherence. Really.
Chait: “Incoherence is simply a natural byproduct of of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and a rejection of ideological certainty.” I think he thinks he’s helping. But, in any case, liberalism is not marked by it’s lack of coherence, or by it’s promise “to produce certain outcomes: more prosperity and security, especially for the poor and middle classes; a cleaner environment; safer food and drugs; and so on.”
Liberalism is not a list. It’s just not. And it is not a list that has incoherence as a natural byproduct of being a list that rejects ideological certainty. Green, Hobhouse, Dewey, Rawls, et al did not see themselves as championing incoherent lists of things people might happen to want. They championed a particular conception of the relationship between the citizen and the state based on what they took to be compelling general normative principles.
Which is why Chait looks dense when he takes it to be a flaw in conservative thinking that it appeals to compelling general normative principles. He thinks it’s telling when Milton Friedman says, “Freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself,” when he should simply be nodding. But this is not a statement of laissez faire though the heavens may fall. Friedman is simply enunciating a fairly banal and unobjectionable liberal principle. Freedom is an end in itself, things that are constitutive of freedom are thus ends in themselves, and economic freedom is constitutive of freedom, so an end in itself. How does Chait think he got his list of socioeconomic desiderata? Handed down from liberal Sinai? It’s the list he found on his desk when he started at TNR and TNR’s list is definitive of liberalism? Or are the items on the list thought to be instrumental to or constitutive of some liberal good, such as freedom? Perhaps.
Anyway, you might want to disagree with Friedman, for whatever bad reason, and say that economic freedom is not part of freedom broadly understood. But if you replace “economic freedom” in Friedman’s sentence and substitute “x” where x is anything that is part of freedom broadly understood, and you still disagree, then there is no intelligible sense in which you are a liberal.
Accepting Friedman’s principle, that things that are constitutive of freedom are ends in themselves because freedom is an end in itself, does not disqualify you from good standing as empiricist because empiricism is indifferent between values. If you like freedom, and you can say with adequate specifity what freedom is, then empiricism can help you know how best to maximize freedom. If you like totalitiarian dictatorship, empiricism can tell you how best to sustain a totalitarian dictatorship. If you like safer food and drugs … etc. Free-market types can’t fail to be empiricists simply because they are not empiricist liberals, although this at times appears to be Chait’s argument.
If God came down and told conservatives that free-markets and smaller government aren’t the best way to get the things on the list kept in the offices of the New Republic (“And I know,” God said, “for it is I who made Nature’s Laws”) and the conservatives said, “Oh, that’s OK God, we’ve got a different list in the offices of Americans for Tax Reform, but then you knew that,” that’s not a failure of empiricism.
Throughout the article Chait blithely sides with government-interventionist economic policy, as if the matter had been decisively resolved through empirical inquiry, that there is no ongoing debate among serious economists, and those on the other side are simply benighted ideologues unmoved by empirical considerations.
Chait cites several conservative punditocracy responses to Michael Kinsley’s argument that PRAs can’t increase national wealth. Apparently, many of them think personal accounts would be a good idea even if Kinsely was right. To Chait this is evidence of dogmatic commitment to the devolution of power from state to citizen.
This preference for removing power from Washington is simply something that either you accept or you don’t. It’s neither right nor wrong in an absolute sense. It does, however, make empirical reasoning pointless. Viewed pragmatically, Social Security raises questions about which economics has a lot to say: balancing the tradeoffs between retiree incomes and costs to workers, allocating risk, and so on. Liberal thinking, unlike conservative thinking, actually hinges on the outcome of those questions.
First, many people prefer removing power from Washington on what they take to be empirical grounds about the relative effectiveness of federal vs state vs individual control in achieving some goal they care about. (Again, Chait seems, bizarrely enough, to interpret a commitment to different goals from his as a failure of empiricism.) Second, is Michael Kinsley Jonathan Chait’s main source of economic theorizing? I swear that just two weeks ago I heard the 2004 Nobel winner say that a system of social security personal accounts would have a monumental effect on the supply of labor, and thus on growth, and national wealth. So what’s an empiricist to do? Throw in one’s lot with Michael Kinsley or Edward Prescott?
Well, this question leads us to the point that Chait doesn’t understand what empiricism is. Look:
. . . the remedy of smaller government is particularly ill-suited for the problem of health care. The market for medical services does not resemble the market for blue jeans. Among other problems, health insurance firms have every incentive to deny coverage to those most likely to get sick, which makes the health insurance market inefficient and prohibitively expensive. Economists call this phenomenon “adverse selection,” and it is inherent in the private health care market. It cannot be solved without some kind of government intervention.
Let it now go unsaid that the market for medical services does rather resemble the market for blue jeans in the absence of government interference. For now let us consider the example of adverse selection. Chait repeats a a prediction of economic theory, given certain assumptions. In a context of perfect information, there is no adverse selection because of the possibility of price discrimination. If we relax the assumption of perfect information, and allow for informational assymetries, then we get adverse selection. But high theory, based on nosebleed-inducing abstraction, simply generates hypotheses, many of which we know to be false, to have no empirical basis. We could relax or assert different assumptions and get different results. The proclamations of theory have a grip on the empiricist only to the extent that the assumptions have empirical teeth (which is why I don’t believe Prescott about the effects of PRAs on labor supply).
Tyler Cowen, at least as good an economist as Michael Kinsley, writes:
Economists miss one of the biggest problems with insurance. We are blinkered by adverse selection models, which imply that the dangerous prospects most want to buy insurance. The opposite is more often true. If you are an irresponsible driver, you are likely to be irresponsible in other spheres as well and not buy auto insurance. On the whole many insurance markets show positive rather than adverse selection. . . this means that the people who most need insurance will be the least likely to buy it.
Now, maybe you think that the fact that people who you think need insurance often don’t try to buy it is a problem the state needs to solve, but it’s not a problem with the market. The main point is, Chait doesn’t know that commitment to economic theory is not tantamount to a commitment to empiricism, and that he just happens to select the set of theoretical assumptions that generates a problem he claims “cannot be solved without government intervention.”
I think that’s enough. Let’s just grant that if Chait is correct, and liberalism is by nature incoherent, then his article successfully embodies liberal ideals to a spectacularly high degree. And that the guy’s no Francis Bacon.
Will,
Regarding this:
David Friedman made a similar point a few years ago in post the rest of which I disagree with (and it’s probably one of the only things he has every written that I find disagreeble). Here’s how he put it:
Will, I think Rawls’s burdens of judgment could shed light on this Chait piece. As you know, Rawls says that people reasonably disagree about conceptions of justice as well as religious and moral doctrines due to the following (abridged) factors:
(1) The evidence–empirical and scientific–bearing on the case is conflicting and complex, and thus hard to assess and evaluate.
(2) Even where we agree fully about the kinds of considerations that are relevant, we may disagree about their weight and so arrive at different judgments.
(3) To some extent (how great we cannot tell) the way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped by our total experience.
(4) Often there are different kinds of normative considerations of different force on both sides of an issue and it is difficult to make an overall assessment.
The burdens of judgment are sufficient to explain reasonable disagreement between libertarians, egalitarian liberals, and conservatives. Adherents of each of these traditions make reasonable yet incompatible judgments about justice, moral values, and the relevant evidence (within certain bounds). So against Chait, we don’t need to explain disagreement between liberals and conservatives by appealing to the notion that liberals embrace empiricism while conservatives are ideological. We only need to point to the differing reasonable ways in which liberals and conservatives interpret evidence and endorse moral principles.
So this is basically to say what you said, but I thought I would sneek in some Rawls while we’re at it.
I have nothing of actual substance to add, but I do want to say that if you keep using “it’s” for “its”, you will be lined up against the wall and shot. There’s no apostrophe in the possessive.
What a pleasant fairy tale that political decisions are based on anything but political results.
Take school vouchers. The main goals are to weaken the teachers unions (strong Democratic supports) and channel money to religious institutions (strong Republican supporters). No one really cares if it will provide for a better education system…though the Republicans always pay a few shills to say vouchers are about the children.
monkyboy writes,
Taken from the Georgia Public Policy Foundation:
The Children’s Education Foundation (CEF) was started in August of 1992 with a gift of $1 million from a successful Atlanta businessman who wanted to provide a choice of educational opportunities to low-income families. Because of limited finances, these families had no choice in where their children went to school.
The program was designed to provide participating families with a 50 percent financial scholarship (in the form of a voucher) toward the tuition cost at a school of the parents’ choice, either public or private. The other half of the tuition would have to be paid by the family.
Despite the availability of a “free” education at their assigned public school, many times more low-income families applied to participate in the program than could be accommodated. Within the first week of the program’s announcement, CEF received more than 500 applications for the 200 slots, and was forced to cut off applications when the number reached nearly 1,000.
Being able to remain at the public school system of her early school years (City of Decatur) gave Tiffany much needed stability in the seventh grade when her family was falling apart and she was faced with having to move to an inferior and unfamiliar middle school. (Tiffany’s residence was moved out of Decatur, so she was faced with a $2,250 out-of-district tuition to remain in her excellent public school, Renfroe Middle School.)
The Amish people in the Pennsylvania Dutch country are free to attend their own schools and to follow the way of life that they as a community have chosen. As with the Amish people, children in inner-city Atlanta, and many others throughout the entire metropolitan area, also want to fulfill their hopes and dreams by getting the best education available. Therefore, those hopes and dreams may not be fulfilled by attending the public school to which they are assigned. For example, Murjan Ali’s dreams include attending a Black Muslim school. For Micha and Rina Ghertner, it is attending Yeshiva, a Hebrew school.
For these children and many more, the privately-funded voucher program of the Children’s Education Foundation is their only hope — their ticket out. Being financially disadvantaged, these children would have no alternative to the schools assigned to them, except for CEF.
—-
So tell me again, monkeyboy: who doesn’t really care about providing a better education system?
Ummm…Micha, you seemed to have proven my point about channeling money to religious institutions???
This also seems to be a private effort, not a government program. I don’t think anyone doubts rich kids (and kids helped by rich people) have better schools open to them.
Government funded vouchers would take money away from public schools…
Ummm…Micha, you seemed to have proven my point about channeling money to religious institutions???
Don’t change points in midstream. Your “point” was that vouchers are really just a vast right-wing conspiracy to channel money to strong Republican supporters for political results.
As the Supreme Court itself recognized, it is the families who ultimately decide whether their vouchers will be spent on religious schools or secular schools, not the government.
And I don’t know whether you know this or not, but you may want to rethink exactly how much support Republicans get from Jews and Black Muslims. Surely two of the most widely represented groups in the Republican base.
This also seems to be a private effort, not a government program. I don’t think anyone doubts rich kids (and kids helped by rich people) have better schools open to them.
And yet, acknowledging this, you still wish to deny these same opportunities to poor children. Shame on you for calling yourself a liberal.
Government funded vouchers would take money away from public schools…
…And give it to poor children so that they can go to better schools. You seem more concerned with giving money to public schools than you do with actually doing things that help the children who go to these schools.
Will – this “monkyboy” device is simply delicious.
This time, I think, you went just a little too over the top to fool anyone. School vouchers as wealth transfer from the Democratic poor to the Republican rich?
Now that’s some level-headed empiricism!
Javier, Yes! The burdens of judgment!
Somebody should hand Chait a copy of _The Vision of the Anointed_, just for the fun of watching his head explode.
Micha, whether handing every child a voucher would = better education is open to debate. The motives of the Republicans are pretty clear, though.
Take the war in Iraq. It’s obvious the Republicans calculated their chances of re-election would be better off if we invaded Iraq, so they did. it. Their publicly stated reason for going in changed frequently, but the real reason didn’t. That their pals in the defense industry cleaned up was a bonus, too.
Same thing with the recent restriction of lawsuits against companies. Trial Lawyers are a big supporter of the Democrats. This bill was just an attempt to limit their income.
Again, that Rebublican supporters don’t have to worry so much if one of their products kills or maims a bunch of people is a bonus. I can’t even remember what the publicly stated reason for this bill was…something about protecting consumers by limiting their right to sue a company?
Political power gain + economic gain for your supporters = passed bill.
Micha,
You are proposing diverting stolen tax money so that the children of the improvident poor can get better educations.
You even advocate giving poor children the same opportunities as richer children, in direct contradiction of the sainted Hayek’s writings on the subject.
What will this do to their parents’ incentives? And you call yourself an anarcho-capitalist.
Gareth,
Where did Hayek say that one shouldn’t divert stolen tax money from an entirely unneeded welfare benefit to rich families to a welfare benefit to poor families? If I recall, Hayek was all in favor of providing a minimum floor for the poor.
Shifting already stolen tax money to more efficient and more moral uses in no way conflicts with anarcho-capitalism. I’d prefer to get the government out of the education business altogether, but until that happens, means testing and school choice for poor children is the way to go.
Micha, whether handing every child a voucher would = better education is open to debate. The motives of the Republicans are pretty clear, though.
Where do you get the idea that Republicans came up with this idea? Just like Social Security privatization, school choice is an issue that libertarians like Milton Friedman and the Cato Institute have been advocating for decades, and has only recently been adopted by Republicans. I could care less what their motives might be. I judge public policies by their expected consequences, and not by the motives of the people who propose them.
Your M.O. seems to be:
Step 1: Assume all Republicans intend to do evil.
Step 2: Conclude from Step 1 that any policies proposed by Republicans are necessarily evil, because that is what Republicans intend to do.
Step 3: Profit!
Monkey: None of that, sadly, is “obvious” to anyone who doesn’t already have it in for The Evil Republicans.
(PS. What was Clinton’s reason for the Balkan interventions? I’m personally inclined to believe that he, just like Bush, sent in troops because he thought it was the right thing to do.
Are you going to claim he’s also in the pocket of the Miltiary Industrial Complex(tm), or are things Different When It’s A Democrat? Either one would be interesting to watch you try and rationalise.)
Hehe, Micha, that’s one of my favorite South Parks.
I’m not saying the Democrats are any less calculating than the Republicans.
Take the Social Security ‘reform’ effort led by the Republicans. There are plenty of ways to extend the life of SS with small adjustments in retirement age, benefit calulations, tax rates, etc.
Instead, the Republicans propose private accounts. That these accounts will give Wall Street firms (leading Republican supporters, natch) tens if not hundreds of billions in windfall bucks isn’t even disputed by Bush.
How transparent can you get?
The thought that anything gets done in Washington because it’s the right thing to do is laughable.
Take the Social Security ‘reform’ effort led by the Republicans.
I just finished writing that the effort is not being led by Republicans, but by libertarians. The Republicans only followed after the fact.
There are plenty of ways to extend the life of SS with small adjustments in retirement age, benefit calulations, tax rates, etc.
Sure, and there may have been plenty of ways to extend the institution of slavery. Why we would want to extend the either of these two dreadful (but certainly not on the same level ethically) social institutions is beyond me. Privatization is a step towards ending it, not mending it, and that’s a good thing.
That these accounts will give Wall Street firms (leading Republican supporters, natch) tens if not hundreds of billions in windfall bucks isn’t even disputed by Bush.
And why should it be? Doesn’t any large privatization effort necessarily give private firms hundreds of billions in windfall bucks? That’s simply the definition of privatization: instead of the government taking people’s money through taxation, firms and customers trade value for value. What’s the problem?
The thought that anything gets done in Washington because it’s the right thing to do is laughable.
And yet you want to solidify the statist system which you yourself admit is easily and inevitably corruptable? Whose laughing now, monkyboy?
Hehe Micha, libertarians are just the boots Republicans strap on when they go wading in crap. The $2.5 trillion in debt they’ve taken on since they got in power ought to give you a clue they aren’t for smaller government.
Oh, I don’t need any clues about that. It’s as obvious as a Mack truck barreling staight towards you. But again, that has little to do with anything that’s been said in this thread.
Hayek may not have been against public education, but he was against rhetoric about equal opportunities. (Rightly too, because you can’t have equality of opportunity for one generation without equality of condition for the previous one.)
Since when am I obligated to agree with everything Hayek said?
Insofar as we can provide better opportunities for the disadvantaged without engaging in political violence to force others to submit to our authority, that is most certainly a good thing. The fact that liberals like monkyboy say they want to improve educational opportunities for poor children, yet seem more concerned with making sure lots of money goes to public schools than with making sure actual children get what the tax dollars are paying for, is at once both incredibly humorous and incredibly frightening. It shows where some people’s real priorities are: not on helping people; but instead on maintaining political power at any cost. (borrowing a concept from monkeyboy himself)
I’m hardly a liberal, Micha. Kerry was the first Democrat I’ve voted for in 25 years. I just consider this current crop of Republicans greedy little thugs who will do anything for a buck, including starting our first unprovoked war.
If we were starting from scratch, maybe vouchers would be the way to go. But we have invested trillions of dollars in our current education system and in most cases it provides a perfectly good result.
Libertarians seem perfectly happy to ignore the massive transition costs of their programs, and they cannot guarantee a better result, just the idea that maybe their system will work better than the current one.
Poor education of a student can be attributed to poor parent involvement as much as ‘bad’ schools. Handing the daughter of a single-parent crack addict $5000 a year ain’t gonna get her a better education.
Ugh, I’m through here. Enough stupidity for one day.
Sleep well, Micha. Dream of a Libertarian Paradise
Since this comments thread quickly descended into a blob of stuff irrelevant to the actual post, I’ll go ahead and take refuge with Wild Pegasus: I am utterly astounded that anyone with a modicum of higher education — hell, anyone who simply READS even just occasionally — can consistently write “it’s” where the possessive “its” should be.
Yeah, go ahead, somebody: “Pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes is poor Web etiquette.” Bullshit. That’s an antiquated canard from the days when the Internet was dominated by a bunch of math geeks who couldn’t spell or use grammar properly.
In 2005, pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes is perfectly proper. It’s not only proper, it’s commendable. The world needs to spin more efficiently, and helping others to communicate with precision only helps that cause.
This blog’s author can help the world spin more efficiently by remembering the following:
– “It’s” is a contraction of “it is” or “it has.”
– “Its” is the possessive form of the pronoun “it.”
Another old Internet myth is that when a poster corrects the spelling or grammar of another poster, he inevitably makes a spelling or grammar mistake in his own post. If someone can actually find an error in this post, I welcome it.
If we were starting from scratch, maybe vouchers would be the way to go. But we have invested trillions of dollars in our current education system and in most cases it provides a perfectly good result.
Actually, for the people who can least afford a decent education, it provides not only a lousy education but little chance for any other. This isn’t to say that I support vouchers – I don’t – but your argument is simply that we’ve spent so much money for mediocre results that it would be foolish to do something to get better results. That seems, at best, retarded.
Libertarians seem perfectly happy to ignore the massive transition costs of their programs
Since most libertarian programmes are actually a reduction or abolition of other programmes, the transition costs are nearly non-existent or even negative. Vouchers have a small transition cost, and the thorough, correct libertarian solution also has a small transition cost.
- Josh
fwiw, i think chait is grasping at something real.
when he cites his list of certain outcomes:
… he is discussing tangible things — not ideas but material, which is to say not ideology but materialism. friedman, for his part, when he says
… is in fact reciting ideology. he may feel it derived of empirical evidence, but it is a value judgement. freedom is NOT an a priori good; as hume demonstrated so clearly, there is no such thing.
unfortunately, chait (as you well note) does not recognize this point as applying to himself — his views are no less intrinsic value judgements. he simply places value on utility over individuality.
and therein the confusion — “liberal” is a word too abused to have meaning. chait seems to mean materialist. you seem to mean libertarian, when you say
both have been called liberal. and there are empirical examples to support both.
Since most libertarian programmes are actually a reduction or abolition of other programmes, the transition costs are nearly non-existent or even negative. Vouchers have a small transition cost, and the thorough, correct libertarian solution also has a small transition cost.
- Josh
Small transition cost?
I think this fits in with Will’s original post nicely. An average elementary school costs about $30 million to build. Throw in books, cubbies, school buses, etc. and you are looking at over $50 million. There is one in every neighborhood in America.
School districts enjoy certain economies of scale because they are educating every kid in America. Under the voucher program, the cost of replacing one elementary school with 30-40 smaller ones to suit the tastes of different parents would probably double or triple the costs.
There may be no transition costs for the government, but someone will have to pay these costs…
“On the whole many insurance markets show positive rather than adverse selection. . . this means that the people who most need insurance will be the least likely to buy it.”
A more likely explanation is that the people who most need insurance will be unable to afford buying their own plan. Ever hear of a pre-existing condition clause? These are inherently adverse-selective. I would add that they’re a market failure as well since the chronic, day-to-day medical expenses, i.e. the ones most likely to be financially crushing, are the ones that aren’t covered.
More directly, Will, when was the last time you couldn’t afford medical care that you desperately needed? I have Crohns disease, and a few years ago I was unable to afford my $500 a month prescriptions on my $7 an hour job. I have a 10 inch scar from my sternum to my crotch, where they took out a big chunk of my intestine, to show for it. I also ran up thousands of dollars of credit card debt during that period of time on my prescription bills. There comes a point when you are forced to choose financial ruin or physical ruin.
As for Tyler Cowen, the whole “people who need insurance are too irresponsible to buy it” line isn’t quite insulting enough. He should come out and say what he means — people in the situation I used to be in should just die because we can’t afford our medical bills. Asshole…
Actually I think Chait gets adverse selection wrong. It isn’t so much that insurance companies don’t want to insure the high risk, but that they want to charge the appropriate premium to people of different risk levels. This is why you see things like low deductible/high premium and high deductibles/low premium to induce people to self-select.
Granted the people who are very high risk are unlikely to find insurance, but I doubt many of them would want it anyways since the premium would be so high.
Insurance only applies when an event is uncertain and for the most part unlikely. Hence the person with a pre-existing condition can’t get insurance because the cost of insurance would be equal to the cost of the medical treatement.
Only if the insurance company doesn’t know about it, and doesn’t have the clause you note. Forcing insurance companies not to have such clauses would be very bad in that it would raise everybody’s rates and likely result in more people not having insurance not less.
This is not really a market failure in that the market would never have worked even in ideal circumstances. Most market failures such as externalities, adverse selection, moral hazard and even public goods result from non-ideal circumstances (e.g. imperfect information, ill defined property rights, etc.).
He isn’t saying that at all, and putting words in his mouth is dishonest.
As for your plight exactly what would you have other people do? Medical resources are not infinite and if some are given to you that means other have to go without. Exactly who should go without and who should decide? Do we want that decision to be politicized? Even if it is politicized that doesn’t mean you’ll get the treatment you want or even need.
I think this fits in with Will’s original post nicely. An average elementary school costs about $30 million to build. Throw in books, cubbies, school buses, etc. and you are looking at over $50 million. There is one in every neighborhood in America.
School districts enjoy certain economies of scale because they are educating every kid in America. Under the voucher program, the cost of replacing one elementary school with 30-40 smaller ones to suit the tastes of different parents would probably double or triple the costs.
I teach part-time for Kaplan, a company that specializes in test preparation. They have a large number of offices with classroom facilities in every state in the U.S. (and multiple in driving distance from me), and they also offer classes at local schools and other facitilities. Their offices are nothing more than your standard strip-mall office complex, like a dentists office with larger rooms. Yet I doubt they spend anywhere near the amount of money you cited.
You are stuck in the mold of thinking that the free market will provide education in exactly the same way that the government monopoly does. Life doesn’t quite work like that, Bub.
And anyway, why do you care so much about the costs entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists will have to pay to create new schools? Since when is that a concern of statists? You guys are able to think of the most absurd reasons to reject a free market in education when the serious problems of state monopoly education are staring you directly in the face.
Ever hear of a pre-existing condition clause? These are inherently adverse-selective. I would add that they’re a market failure as well since the chronic, day-to-day medical expenses, i.e. the ones most likely to be financially crushing, are the ones that aren’t covered.
This is not a market failure of insurance because it falls outside the definition of insurance. Insurance insures against risk. Pre-existing conditions are not a risk; they are a certainty.
Maybe you could say that this is a general failure of the market, but that is not a new complaint; everyone already knows that the “market” itself cannot provide charity to people who can’t afford things. That is something only charitable people and organizations, or thieving governments, can do.
Oops, should have read Steve’s comment first.
Haha, Micha. I will rest easier tonight.
The idea that people are going to vote for a school that resembles “nothing more than your standard strip-mall office complex, like a dentists office with larger rooms” is exactly…zero.
Imagine having to choose between a school run by Enron and a school run by Microsoft:
I have a complaint against a teacher, I gotta sit on hold for two hours before getting to talk to some teenager in India reading off a script…perfect!
Or maybe the school my kid’s in has all its money looted by executives…and in the middle of the year I have to take a month off work to find a new one…that I have to pay for myself…brilliant!
I’d rather vote for that private army you guys keep pushing…hehe
Why would people not want to send their kids to small, simple schools? Would they rather pay many more thousands of dollars per year for enormous campuses with swimming pools, gymnasiums, ampitheaters, and so forth (all of which could be more efficiently and more cheaply provided via other businesses) that are no better at educating students? The high school I attended had about 130 students total, from 9th grade to 12th, so about 30 students per grade. I knew each student in my class and most of the students in the school by name, unlike many public schools these days with thousands of other students in each grade. Why is big better? Just because that’s what you are familar with and that’s what the government provides?
I have a complaint against a teacher, I gotta sit on hold for two hours before getting to talk to some teenager in India reading off a script…perfect!
Kaplan is a private corporation, and yet all teachers must provide students with their email address and/or a phone number and are required to respond within 24 hours to any query.
Or maybe the school my kid’s in has all its money looted by executives…and in the middle of the year I have to take a month off work to find a new one…that I have to pay for myself…brilliant!
Would you like me to point you to the many cases of government bureaucrats and teacher’s union thugs looting the money that should have been spent on education? Or how about the time that one of my sister’s teachers got sick in the middle of the year and was replaced with a incompetent substitute? (One of the reasons my sister switched schools, incidentally.)
I’d rather vote for that private army you guys keep pushing…hehe
Much worse than that public army currently using your tax dollars to wage a war against a country that represented no threat to you or me.
I have no problem with vouchers. They seem like good old-time social democracy to me. I wonder why there haven’t been more experiments at the local and state level.
I think the libertarians here miss the point about adverse selection. It is a theoretical problem with markets with asymmetrical information. If there is a well-functioning insurance market, then someone has found a way to overcome it.
But one insight behind social democracy is that many socially-desirable insurance markets don’t exist. Another is that people are rationally ingnorang about risk, and so can be better off when a paternalistic state makes them pay for insurance against risks they would otherwise ignore.
Or you could find a school that allows for month-to-month payments. My son goes to a private school and that is how 95%+ of the parents pay. I also tell people to look for this when looking for a martial arts school. With the latter not because of “looting” but because I view the month-to-month schools as being more interested in teaching the art than making a quick buck.
Yes, but it usually entails things like different permiums and deductibles, contracts that result in non-coverage if the hidden information is revealed etc. All of these things modern day progressives see as unfair.
What is truly hypocritical about the modern progressives is that they don’t seem to see the unfairness of those with the hidden information taking advantage of not just the insurance company (i.e., people), but also of the insurance companies other customers (more people). I’m not sure if this is due to some sort of schizophrenic like nature of the progressive philosophy (corporations are bad, profit making is bad, etc.) or just simple ignorance.
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Will,
Regarding this:
David Friedman made a similar point a few years ago in post the rest of which I disagree with (and it’s probably one of the only things he has every written that I find disagreeble). Here’s how he put it:
Will, I think Rawls’s burdens of judgment could shed light on this Chait piece. As you know, Rawls says that people reasonably disagree about conceptions of justice as well as religious and moral doctrines due to the following (abridged) factors:
(1) The evidence–empirical and scientific–bearing on the case is conflicting and complex, and thus hard to assess and evaluate.
(2) Even where we agree fully about the kinds of considerations that are relevant, we may disagree about their weight and so arrive at different judgments.
(3) To some extent (how great we cannot tell) the way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped by our total experience.
(4) Often there are different kinds of normative considerations of different force on both sides of an issue and it is difficult to make an overall assessment.
The burdens of judgment are sufficient to explain reasonable disagreement between libertarians, egalitarian liberals, and conservatives. Adherents of each of these traditions make reasonable yet incompatible judgments about justice, moral values, and the relevant evidence (within certain bounds). So against Chait, we don’t need to explain disagreement between liberals and conservatives by appealing to the notion that liberals embrace empiricism while conservatives are ideological. We only need to point to the differing reasonable ways in which liberals and conservatives interpret evidence and endorse moral principles.
So this is basically to say what you said, but I thought I would sneek in some Rawls while we’re at it.
I have nothing of actual substance to add, but I do want to say that if you keep using “it’s” for “its”, you will be lined up against the wall and shot. There’s no apostrophe in the possessive.
What a pleasant fairy tale that political decisions are based on anything but political results.
Take school vouchers. The main goals are to weaken the teachers unions (strong Democratic supports) and channel money to religious institutions (strong Republican supporters). No one really cares if it will provide for a better education system…though the Republicans always pay a few shills to say vouchers are about the children.
monkyboy writes,
Taken from the Georgia Public Policy Foundation:
The Children’s Education Foundation (CEF) was started in August of 1992 with a gift of $1 million from a successful Atlanta businessman who wanted to provide a choice of educational opportunities to low-income families. Because of limited finances, these families had no choice in where their children went to school.
The program was designed to provide participating families with a 50 percent financial scholarship (in the form of a voucher) toward the tuition cost at a school of the parents’ choice, either public or private. The other half of the tuition would have to be paid by the family.
Despite the availability of a “free” education at their assigned public school, many times more low-income families applied to participate in the program than could be accommodated. Within the first week of the program’s announcement, CEF received more than 500 applications for the 200 slots, and was forced to cut off applications when the number reached nearly 1,000.
Being able to remain at the public school system of her early school years (City of Decatur) gave Tiffany much needed stability in the seventh grade when her family was falling apart and she was faced with having to move to an inferior and unfamiliar middle school. (Tiffany’s residence was moved out of Decatur, so she was faced with a $2,250 out-of-district tuition to remain in her excellent public school, Renfroe Middle School.)
The Amish people in the Pennsylvania Dutch country are free to attend their own schools and to follow the way of life that they as a community have chosen. As with the Amish people, children in inner-city Atlanta, and many others throughout the entire metropolitan area, also want to fulfill their hopes and dreams by getting the best education available. Therefore, those hopes and dreams may not be fulfilled by attending the public school to which they are assigned. For example, Murjan Ali’s dreams include attending a Black Muslim school. For Micha and Rina Ghertner, it is attending Yeshiva, a Hebrew school.
For these children and many more, the privately-funded voucher program of the Children’s Education Foundation is their only hope — their ticket out. Being financially disadvantaged, these children would have no alternative to the schools assigned to them, except for CEF.
—-
So tell me again, monkeyboy: who doesn’t really care about providing a better education system?
Ummm…Micha, you seemed to have proven my point about channeling money to religious institutions???
This also seems to be a private effort, not a government program. I don’t think anyone doubts rich kids (and kids helped by rich people) have better schools open to them.
Government funded vouchers would take money away from public schools…
Ummm…Micha, you seemed to have proven my point about channeling money to religious institutions???
Don’t change points in midstream. Your “point” was that vouchers are really just a vast right-wing conspiracy to channel money to strong Republican supporters for political results.
As the Supreme Court itself recognized, it is the families who ultimately decide whether their vouchers will be spent on religious schools or secular schools, not the government.
And I don’t know whether you know this or not, but you may want to rethink exactly how much support Republicans get from Jews and Black Muslims. Surely two of the most widely represented groups in the Republican base.
This also seems to be a private effort, not a government program. I don’t think anyone doubts rich kids (and kids helped by rich people) have better schools open to them.
And yet, acknowledging this, you still wish to deny these same opportunities to poor children. Shame on you for calling yourself a liberal.
Government funded vouchers would take money away from public schools…
…And give it to poor children so that they can go to better schools. You seem more concerned with giving money to public schools than you do with actually doing things that help the children who go to these schools.
Will – this “monkyboy” device is simply delicious.
This time, I think, you went just a little too over the top to fool anyone. School vouchers as wealth transfer from the Democratic poor to the Republican rich?
Now that’s some level-headed empiricism!
Javier, Yes! The burdens of judgment!
Somebody should hand Chait a copy of _The Vision of the Anointed_, just for the fun of watching his head explode.
Micha, whether handing every child a voucher would = better education is open to debate. The motives of the Republicans are pretty clear, though.
Take the war in Iraq. It’s obvious the Republicans calculated their chances of re-election would be better off if we invaded Iraq, so they did. it. Their publicly stated reason for going in changed frequently, but the real reason didn’t. That their pals in the defense industry cleaned up was a bonus, too.
Same thing with the recent restriction of lawsuits against companies. Trial Lawyers are a big supporter of the Democrats. This bill was just an attempt to limit their income.
Again, that Rebublican supporters don’t have to worry so much if one of their products kills or maims a bunch of people is a bonus. I can’t even remember what the publicly stated reason for this bill was…something about protecting consumers by limiting their right to sue a company?
Political power gain + economic gain for your supporters = passed bill.
Micha,
You are proposing diverting stolen tax money so that the children of the improvident poor can get better educations.
You even advocate giving poor children the same opportunities as richer children, in direct contradiction of the sainted Hayek’s writings on the subject.
What will this do to their parents’ incentives? And you call yourself an anarcho-capitalist.
Gareth,
Where did Hayek say that one shouldn’t divert stolen tax money from an entirely unneeded welfare benefit to rich families to a welfare benefit to poor families? If I recall, Hayek was all in favor of providing a minimum floor for the poor.
Shifting already stolen tax money to more efficient and more moral uses in no way conflicts with anarcho-capitalism. I’d prefer to get the government out of the education business altogether, but until that happens, means testing and school choice for poor children is the way to go.
Micha, whether handing every child a voucher would = better education is open to debate. The motives of the Republicans are pretty clear, though.
Where do you get the idea that Republicans came up with this idea? Just like Social Security privatization, school choice is an issue that libertarians like Milton Friedman and the Cato Institute have been advocating for decades, and has only recently been adopted by Republicans. I could care less what their motives might be. I judge public policies by their expected consequences, and not by the motives of the people who propose them.
Your M.O. seems to be:
Step 1: Assume all Republicans intend to do evil.
Step 2: Conclude from Step 1 that any policies proposed by Republicans are necessarily evil, because that is what Republicans intend to do.
Step 3: Profit!
Monkey: None of that, sadly, is “obvious” to anyone who doesn’t already have it in for The Evil Republicans.
(PS. What was Clinton’s reason for the Balkan interventions? I’m personally inclined to believe that he, just like Bush, sent in troops because he thought it was the right thing to do.
Are you going to claim he’s also in the pocket of the Miltiary Industrial Complex(tm), or are things Different When It’s A Democrat? Either one would be interesting to watch you try and rationalise.)
Hehe, Micha, that’s one of my favorite South Parks.
I’m not saying the Democrats are any less calculating than the Republicans.
Take the Social Security ‘reform’ effort led by the Republicans. There are plenty of ways to extend the life of SS with small adjustments in retirement age, benefit calulations, tax rates, etc.
Instead, the Republicans propose private accounts. That these accounts will give Wall Street firms (leading Republican supporters, natch) tens if not hundreds of billions in windfall bucks isn’t even disputed by Bush.
How transparent can you get?
The thought that anything gets done in Washington because it’s the right thing to do is laughable.
Take the Social Security ‘reform’ effort led by the Republicans.
I just finished writing that the effort is not being led by Republicans, but by libertarians. The Republicans only followed after the fact.
There are plenty of ways to extend the life of SS with small adjustments in retirement age, benefit calulations, tax rates, etc.
Sure, and there may have been plenty of ways to extend the institution of slavery. Why we would want to extend the either of these two dreadful (but certainly not on the same level ethically) social institutions is beyond me. Privatization is a step towards ending it, not mending it, and that’s a good thing.
That these accounts will give Wall Street firms (leading Republican supporters, natch) tens if not hundreds of billions in windfall bucks isn’t even disputed by Bush.
And why should it be? Doesn’t any large privatization effort necessarily give private firms hundreds of billions in windfall bucks? That’s simply the definition of privatization: instead of the government taking people’s money through taxation, firms and customers trade value for value. What’s the problem?
The thought that anything gets done in Washington because it’s the right thing to do is laughable.
And yet you want to solidify the statist system which you yourself admit is easily and inevitably corruptable? Whose laughing now, monkyboy?
Hehe Micha, libertarians are just the boots Republicans strap on when they go wading in crap. The $2.5 trillion in debt they’ve taken on since they got in power ought to give you a clue they aren’t for smaller government.
Oh, I don’t need any clues about that. It’s as obvious as a Mack truck barreling staight towards you. But again, that has little to do with anything that’s been said in this thread.
Hayek may not have been against public education, but he was against rhetoric about equal opportunities. (Rightly too, because you can’t have equality of opportunity for one generation without equality of condition for the previous one.)
Since when am I obligated to agree with everything Hayek said?
Insofar as we can provide better opportunities for the disadvantaged without engaging in political violence to force others to submit to our authority, that is most certainly a good thing. The fact that liberals like monkyboy say they want to improve educational opportunities for poor children, yet seem more concerned with making sure lots of money goes to public schools than with making sure actual children get what the tax dollars are paying for, is at once both incredibly humorous and incredibly frightening. It shows where some people’s real priorities are: not on helping people; but instead on maintaining political power at any cost. (borrowing a concept from monkeyboy himself)
I’m hardly a liberal, Micha. Kerry was the first Democrat I’ve voted for in 25 years. I just consider this current crop of Republicans greedy little thugs who will do anything for a buck, including starting our first unprovoked war.
If we were starting from scratch, maybe vouchers would be the way to go. But we have invested trillions of dollars in our current education system and in most cases it provides a perfectly good result.
Libertarians seem perfectly happy to ignore the massive transition costs of their programs, and they cannot guarantee a better result, just the idea that maybe their system will work better than the current one.
Poor education of a student can be attributed to poor parent involvement as much as ‘bad’ schools. Handing the daughter of a single-parent crack addict $5000 a year ain’t gonna get her a better education.
Ugh, I’m through here. Enough stupidity for one day.
Sleep well, Micha. Dream of a Libertarian Paradise
Since this comments thread quickly descended into a blob of stuff irrelevant to the actual post, I’ll go ahead and take refuge with Wild Pegasus: I am utterly astounded that anyone with a modicum of higher education — hell, anyone who simply READS even just occasionally — can consistently write “it’s” where the possessive “its” should be.
Yeah, go ahead, somebody: “Pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes is poor Web etiquette.” Bullshit. That’s an antiquated canard from the days when the Internet was dominated by a bunch of math geeks who couldn’t spell or use grammar properly.
In 2005, pointing out grammar and spelling mistakes is perfectly proper. It’s not only proper, it’s commendable. The world needs to spin more efficiently, and helping others to communicate with precision only helps that cause.
This blog’s author can help the world spin more efficiently by remembering the following:
– “It’s” is a contraction of “it is” or “it has.”
– “Its” is the possessive form of the pronoun “it.”
Another old Internet myth is that when a poster corrects the spelling or grammar of another poster, he inevitably makes a spelling or grammar mistake in his own post. If someone can actually find an error in this post, I welcome it.
If we were starting from scratch, maybe vouchers would be the way to go. But we have invested trillions of dollars in our current education system and in most cases it provides a perfectly good result.
Actually, for the people who can least afford a decent education, it provides not only a lousy education but little chance for any other. This isn’t to say that I support vouchers – I don’t – but your argument is simply that we’ve spent so much money for mediocre results that it would be foolish to do something to get better results. That seems, at best, retarded.
Libertarians seem perfectly happy to ignore the massive transition costs of their programs
Since most libertarian programmes are actually a reduction or abolition of other programmes, the transition costs are nearly non-existent or even negative. Vouchers have a small transition cost, and the thorough, correct libertarian solution also has a small transition cost.
- Josh
fwiw, i think chait is grasping at something real.
when he cites his list of certain outcomes:
… he is discussing tangible things — not ideas but material, which is to say not ideology but materialism. friedman, for his part, when he says
… is in fact reciting ideology. he may feel it derived of empirical evidence, but it is a value judgement. freedom is NOT an a priori good; as hume demonstrated so clearly, there is no such thing.
unfortunately, chait (as you well note) does not recognize this point as applying to himself — his views are no less intrinsic value judgements. he simply places value on utility over individuality.
and therein the confusion — “liberal” is a word too abused to have meaning. chait seems to mean materialist. you seem to mean libertarian, when you say
both have been called liberal. and there are empirical examples to support both.
Since most libertarian programmes are actually a reduction or abolition of other programmes, the transition costs are nearly non-existent or even negative. Vouchers have a small transition cost, and the thorough, correct libertarian solution also has a small transition cost.
- Josh
Small transition cost?
I think this fits in with Will’s original post nicely. An average elementary school costs about $30 million to build. Throw in books, cubbies, school buses, etc. and you are looking at over $50 million. There is one in every neighborhood in America.
School districts enjoy certain economies of scale because they are educating every kid in America. Under the voucher program, the cost of replacing one elementary school with 30-40 smaller ones to suit the tastes of different parents would probably double or triple the costs.
There may be no transition costs for the government, but someone will have to pay these costs…
“On the whole many insurance markets show positive rather than adverse selection. . . this means that the people who most need insurance will be the least likely to buy it.”
A more likely explanation is that the people who most need insurance will be unable to afford buying their own plan. Ever hear of a pre-existing condition clause? These are inherently adverse-selective. I would add that they’re a market failure as well since the chronic, day-to-day medical expenses, i.e. the ones most likely to be financially crushing, are the ones that aren’t covered.
More directly, Will, when was the last time you couldn’t afford medical care that you desperately needed? I have Crohns disease, and a few years ago I was unable to afford my $500 a month prescriptions on my $7 an hour job. I have a 10 inch scar from my sternum to my crotch, where they took out a big chunk of my intestine, to show for it. I also ran up thousands of dollars of credit card debt during that period of time on my prescription bills. There comes a point when you are forced to choose financial ruin or physical ruin.
As for Tyler Cowen, the whole “people who need insurance are too irresponsible to buy it” line isn’t quite insulting enough. He should come out and say what he means — people in the situation I used to be in should just die because we can’t afford our medical bills. Asshole…
Actually I think Chait gets adverse selection wrong. It isn’t so much that insurance companies don’t want to insure the high risk, but that they want to charge the appropriate premium to people of different risk levels. This is why you see things like low deductible/high premium and high deductibles/low premium to induce people to self-select.
Granted the people who are very high risk are unlikely to find insurance, but I doubt many of them would want it anyways since the premium would be so high.
Insurance only applies when an event is uncertain and for the most part unlikely. Hence the person with a pre-existing condition can’t get insurance because the cost of insurance would be equal to the cost of the medical treatement.
Only if the insurance company doesn’t know about it, and doesn’t have the clause you note. Forcing insurance companies not to have such clauses would be very bad in that it would raise everybody’s rates and likely result in more people not having insurance not less.
This is not really a market failure in that the market would never have worked even in ideal circumstances. Most market failures such as externalities, adverse selection, moral hazard and even public goods result from non-ideal circumstances (e.g. imperfect information, ill defined property rights, etc.).
He isn’t saying that at all, and putting words in his mouth is dishonest.
As for your plight exactly what would you have other people do? Medical resources are not infinite and if some are given to you that means other have to go without. Exactly who should go without and who should decide? Do we want that decision to be politicized? Even if it is politicized that doesn’t mean you’ll get the treatment you want or even need.
I think this fits in with Will’s original post nicely. An average elementary school costs about $30 million to build. Throw in books, cubbies, school buses, etc. and you are looking at over $50 million. There is one in every neighborhood in America.
School districts enjoy certain economies of scale because they are educating every kid in America. Under the voucher program, the cost of replacing one elementary school with 30-40 smaller ones to suit the tastes of different parents would probably double or triple the costs.
I teach part-time for Kaplan, a company that specializes in test preparation. They have a large number of offices with classroom facilities in every state in the U.S. (and multiple in driving distance from me), and they also offer classes at local schools and other facitilities. Their offices are nothing more than your standard strip-mall office complex, like a dentists office with larger rooms. Yet I doubt they spend anywhere near the amount of money you cited.
You are stuck in the mold of thinking that the free market will provide education in exactly the same way that the government monopoly does. Life doesn’t quite work like that, Bub.
And anyway, why do you care so much about the costs entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists will have to pay to create new schools? Since when is that a concern of statists? You guys are able to think of the most absurd reasons to reject a free market in education when the serious problems of state monopoly education are staring you directly in the face.
Ever hear of a pre-existing condition clause? These are inherently adverse-selective. I would add that they’re a market failure as well since the chronic, day-to-day medical expenses, i.e. the ones most likely to be financially crushing, are the ones that aren’t covered.
This is not a market failure of insurance because it falls outside the definition of insurance. Insurance insures against risk. Pre-existing conditions are not a risk; they are a certainty.
Maybe you could say that this is a general failure of the market, but that is not a new complaint; everyone already knows that the “market” itself cannot provide charity to people who can’t afford things. That is something only charitable people and organizations, or thieving governments, can do.
Oops, should have read Steve’s comment first.
Haha, Micha. I will rest easier tonight.
The idea that people are going to vote for a school that resembles “nothing more than your standard strip-mall office complex, like a dentists office with larger rooms” is exactly…zero.
Imagine having to choose between a school run by Enron and a school run by Microsoft:
I have a complaint against a teacher, I gotta sit on hold for two hours before getting to talk to some teenager in India reading off a script…perfect!
Or maybe the school my kid’s in has all its money looted by executives…and in the middle of the year I have to take a month off work to find a new one…that I have to pay for myself…brilliant!
I’d rather vote for that private army you guys keep pushing…hehe
Why would people not want to send their kids to small, simple schools? Would they rather pay many more thousands of dollars per year for enormous campuses with swimming pools, gymnasiums, ampitheaters, and so forth (all of which could be more efficiently and more cheaply provided via other businesses) that are no better at educating students? The high school I attended had about 130 students total, from 9th grade to 12th, so about 30 students per grade. I knew each student in my class and most of the students in the school by name, unlike many public schools these days with thousands of other students in each grade. Why is big better? Just because that’s what you are familar with and that’s what the government provides?
I have a complaint against a teacher, I gotta sit on hold for two hours before getting to talk to some teenager in India reading off a script…perfect!
Kaplan is a private corporation, and yet all teachers must provide students with their email address and/or a phone number and are required to respond within 24 hours to any query.
Or maybe the school my kid’s in has all its money looted by executives…and in the middle of the year I have to take a month off work to find a new one…that I have to pay for myself…brilliant!
Would you like me to point you to the many cases of government bureaucrats and teacher’s union thugs looting the money that should have been spent on education? Or how about the time that one of my sister’s teachers got sick in the middle of the year and was replaced with a incompetent substitute? (One of the reasons my sister switched schools, incidentally.)
I’d rather vote for that private army you guys keep pushing…hehe
Much worse than that public army currently using your tax dollars to wage a war against a country that represented no threat to you or me.
I have no problem with vouchers. They seem like good old-time social democracy to me. I wonder why there haven’t been more experiments at the local and state level.
I think the libertarians here miss the point about adverse selection. It is a theoretical problem with markets with asymmetrical information. If there is a well-functioning insurance market, then someone has found a way to overcome it.
But one insight behind social democracy is that many socially-desirable insurance markets don’t exist. Another is that people are rationally ingnorang about risk, and so can be better off when a paternalistic state makes them pay for insurance against risks they would otherwise ignore.
Or you could find a school that allows for month-to-month payments. My son goes to a private school and that is how 95%+ of the parents pay. I also tell people to look for this when looking for a martial arts school. With the latter not because of “looting” but because I view the month-to-month schools as being more interested in teaching the art than making a quick buck.
Yes, but it usually entails things like different permiums and deductibles, contracts that result in non-coverage if the hidden information is revealed etc. All of these things modern day progressives see as unfair.
What is truly hypocritical about the modern progressives is that they don’t seem to see the unfairness of those with the hidden information taking advantage of not just the insurance company (i.e., people), but also of the insurance companies other customers (more people). I’m not sure if this is due to some sort of schizophrenic like nature of the progressive philosophy (corporations are bad, profit making is bad, etc.) or just simple ignorance.
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Chait is just an educated village idiot. His opinions, analyses, thoughts, are all so biased and partisan as to be useless. He is literally nothing but wasted air…. And everyone with a brain knows it. That's why TNR is generally a laughing stock amongst the sensible….
Chait is just an educated village idiot. His opinions, analyses, thoughts, are all so biased and partisan as to be useless. He is literally nothing but wasted air…. And everyone with a brain knows it. That's why TNR is generally a laughing stock amongst the sensible….